Mission Accomplished
by Tempest
Summary: In an amalgam of DC and Marvel superheroes, what happens when a deadly assassin born without fear starts to kill off the world's greatest superheroes?
1. Mission 1: Kill Superman

Mission 1: Kill Superman  
  
Christie advanced slowly through the mettalic halls of the 'Watchtower,' trying to make as little noise as possible. Several of the Justice League members were capable of hearing more than the average human, so she couldn't afford to move quickly most of the time. On occasion, when the fans would kick up into a higher gear than usual to accommodate for the extra carbon dioxide gas she was placing in the atmosphere. Any time she heard a clank of metal, she pressed her back against the wall and activated her chameleon shield, a nice little trinket her employer gave her for the mission. It was unfortunate that its battery-span was only a total of 30 minutes of use. It took the long time to reach her target, Superman's door, but the fact that she hadn't gotten caught before she reached there was a miracle in itself. Normally, she couldn't have dared attempt this mission, but a solar flare had interfered with the Watchtower's sensors, both internal and external, and there was no better time to do Luthor's business. She didn't bother pressing the 'door open' pad on Superman's door: the change in pressure and light would awake the sleeping giant. Rather, she pulled out a roll-up darkness shield and placed it behind her, bending it to encompass the entire door. This was the most vulnerable point in the mission: If any JLA personnel happened to wander by and see a dark half-orb in front of Superman's door, she was compromised. Slowly, carefully, she gripped the bottom of the door and lifted it manually, bypassing the hydraulics that normally would have opened the door in an instant… and revealed to her target that she was there.   
  
Sweat poured down Christie's face as she inched the metal barricade up, her muscles straining, as she tried to avoid making any sound. Most people would be fearful of this: attacking Superman in his sleep, risking life and limb for money against an invincible foe… but Christie wasn't. Whatever gene it was that caused fear, that handy little destroyer of an emotion, Christie hadn't been born with it. Most of her kind, people without fear, were born autistic or with some other disability that made it impossible for them to use their gifts. The rare, one-in-two-hundred-million, specimen that managed to come with the gene gone and without a disability either died early from an action that most would think of as reckless, commited suicide, or never went anywhere with their lives: wallowing in a fearless fear, a logical limitation, that told them that to do anything special would be dangerous to their health. Christie, on the other hand, was different. She managed to survive without fear… and used that to her advantage. The doctors had told her mother long ago that she wasn't 'technically' born without the gene; the genetics were simply so non-dominant that unless she came into a situation that generated enough fear to kill most people, she would never feel it. Rather than feel deprived, she became obsessed with anything that would create fear: extreme sports, tempting death, anything that she could do. Not only that, but she built her body and kept it in such impossibily good condition that she could survive the things she put it through. This experience in the extreme, and this conditioning, made her the perfect assassin. Which was why Luthor came to her. Which was why she couldn't afford to fail.   
  
When the door nearly reached the top, Christie stopped pushing it up, her muscles trembling. Rather than lift it fully, an action that would cause it to lock, which Superman would certainly hear, she pulled in the dark shield, partially rolled it up and reformed the metal to fit the size of the door, and placed it in the space the door used to occupy. The shield held up the door, still kept the light out, and there was no longer any danger from wandering JLA'ers. Christie pulled out two marbles from her pocket, small things that would seem innocuous to the normal eye… but which held a very specific purpose for her. She pressed one, the one in her right hand, and set the other one on the table. The activated ball served as a sound-nuller that would conceal her movements, the other she would save for later. She strode up to Superman quickly, not needing her movements to be slow any more, and pulled out from her suit a small box. She felt a slight chll as she readied to open the latch.   
Was that… fear?  
She wondered, but she couldn't bring back the emotion, so she continued. She opened the box and slowly pulled out its treasure, careful to grab only the dull ends of it: a kryptonite garotte wire. She almost laughed at the realization that she was about to do something no one else had been able to do, and the reasons why they couldn't do it.   
  
'Those idiots. Spending all their time taunting him and capturing him to make sure he felt ashamed, ridiculed, and tortued at his death. Always using kryptonite like some kind of poison to weaken their opponent before they tried to beat him with their own strength. Could they never get it?'  
She stepped to one side of Superman's bed, pulling her wire as tight as it would go, testing its tensile strength to make sure that it would last like Luthor said it would.   
'Superman was far too strong, even weakened, for them to beat him. Achilles didn't die because the Trojans threw dust at his feet! Achilles died because they speared him in the heel! He was immortal everywhere else, like Superman, and if they were to kill them, they would need to strike his weakness with full force, not slowly! If the Trojans had thrown rocks at Achilles's ankles, his allies would have surrounded and protected him so he could recover, like the JLA did to Superman and all their other members every time they were injured. Christie saw what had to be done, not blinded by testerone, machoism, and fear. Superman would not die because she threw kryptonite at his feet. Superman would die because she speared him in the heel!"  
Christie held the molecule-thin, Psylocke-blade-sharp kryptonite over Superman's neck for five seconds, to make sure the skin their was made pliable enough. Normally, she would try to come behind him and slash his neck with more force, but awake he was simply too alert, and he didn't sleep sitting up, so she took what she had. She pushed down and out on the wire with all of her force, and Superman's death came before he even had the chance to wake up.   
  
After completing her mission, Christie spent no time gloating, moving as quickly as she could. It wouldn't take the Martian Manhunter long to realize that a mind had stopped, and once that happened, she would be found instantly under his telepathic eye. She pulled the garotte wire out of Superman's now-slowly-bleeding neck, carefully wrapping it in its lead case and placing it on her side.. She deactivated the sound nuller, knowing that out in the halls where there was always some sound, fans moving and electronics humming, a complete lack of sound would be noticeable. She didn't put as much energy into being silent, moving quickly, knowing that it was now or never, and the knowledge that she could be caught by sheer luck of a superhero passing by, her skills notwithstanding, caused another chill to go up her spine.   
Yes… that IS fear!  
Once the realization came to her, she was delighted. The emotion wasn't enough to change her movements in any way or cause her to hide, but she reveled in it anyway. When she reached a window on the side where her ship was, she activated her chameleon shield, placed on an oxygen mask that carried its twenty-minute supply on her back, and used a portable glass cutter she kept on hand, a laser-model, to cut a human-sized portion out of the the two-feet thick glass, and let the responding loss vacuum carry her out into the open air. The instant she came into the open air, she felt the gravity shift from the artificial gravity of the Watchtower to the one-sixth gravity of the moon, and landed on her feet lightly even after a seven-story fall. She followed a homing beacon towards her ship, going as fast as her long leaps would carry her, and arriving only a minute before her air ran out. She immediately jumped in, activated the cloaking shield, and flew off the moon back towards Earth to collect her reward. About a mile away, She pulled out a red remote, the command key to the orb she had placed on Superman's desk, and pressed a black button on its side. In a million parallel universes, she would have failed in her mission, but the fates were with her in this universe, as they seemed to always be. The very fact that she hadn't been caught already meant that the warp-space bomb she had planted had rendered the space and time she had been working in unreachable to temporal superheros like Chronos or the JSA's new android friend. Certainly, there were powers that could bypass the bomb, but they were all so isolated and 'all-seeing' that they would either be barred from changing history, like the Oracles, or they wouldn't care about the workings of some pitiful superhero on the scale of a universe. Now it was time to go home.  
  
Luthor's office had changed since the last time Christie entered: new works of art, new sculptures, and Luthor was wearing a new suit. It was no surprise to her, of course: the super rich tended to be a little eccentric about change. The one thing that peaked her interest, though, was the expression on the normally level-headed Luthor. He looked somewhere between shock, outrage, and ecstasy.  
"I will take my pay now… unless you want to refute that I have accomplished the objective."  
Luthor looked at her with that same expression, completely forgetting his business, poker face.  
"Refute it!? It's all over the news! I've seen Superman's cold, dead corpse in front of my eyes!"  
"Then you will pay me?"  
The look on Luthor's face shifted: losing the outrage and shock and picking up an extra cunning that bordered on maniacal.   
"All right."  
He pulled out four suitcases, travel suitcases, and rolled them to her location one by one. She checked each one, looked to make sure they weren't forgeries, and nodded. Luthor's eyes got big as she peeled off her clothes before he realized that below her innocuous business-woman apparel were the clothes of a flight attendant.   
"I heard you were heading on a chopper to give… condolescences to the dead hero, correct?"  
Luthor nodded, slightly confused. Christie pulled all four cases behind her as she walked out the door, a snicker on her face.   
"No one will suspect Luthor's aide to be a murderer, now will they? Especially when she was 'apparently' only hired for one job."  
Luthor smiled and nodded his head.  
"You never cease to amaze."  
  
  
Mission #1 Accomplished: An Epilogue  
  
And the world mourned for the death of Superman, their hero. Just like the last time he died, a number of cults rose up claiming their leader to be Superman, or claiming this and that person to be the ressurected Superman, but they were all denounced as hoaxes since this time, Superman's casket would be glass and not buried, visible for all to see at all times, and guarded by a trio of super-soliders from the United States government's 'new' Spartan Security Force. This time Superman would not be coming back. A number of supervillains made another desperate attempt at world conquest, thinking it would be easier with Superman gone, only to be held back by the JLA, the JSA, the Titans, the Teen Titans, the mutants, the Avengers, and a few freelance heroes. Carried off with minimal casualties, it was the perfect come-back story, and the Green Lantern sounded sorrowful but optimistic when he made his 'A Team Still Strong' speech on the White House steps. The heros and every official government on the nation said that they would take any measures necessary to bring the criminal who killed Superman to justice. Since they couldn't find her, though, Luthor became their sacrificial lamb to the public. With his lifetime imprisonment, using the evidence that he was 400 million dollars poorer the day before Superman died to convict him of hiring someone to murder Superman, the public stopped crying for the murderer's conviction. A few psychics and experts into the criminal psyche: Charles Xavier, Jean Grey, Psylocke, the Martian Manhunter, Batman, Wolverine, the Punisher, and (with police supervision) the Scarecrow, were allowed to enter Superman's room and look for any clues as to the nature of the murder. The time-wave bomb disrupted, on some metaphysical level, the psychics, and the Punisher and Batman couldn't find anything beyond the time-bomb, which they blamed on Luthor. Wolverine couldn't pick up a scent since she was in an airtight suit. Only the Scarecrow even came close to figuring out who it was, stating that the pattern of the criminal was one completely devoid of fear. The mutant-fearing populace started blaming the mutants, saying that only a mutant could have killed Superman so easily. This forced Xavier and his mutants to hide in a remote mountain training academy much like the Institute (except with a more Oriental design) hidden in the mountains of Japan.  
  
Christie didn't hear of any of this. She never watched the television, and the first time she heard anything relating to Superman was when she beat the pulp out of a mugger on the street who had just robbed a wallet with 200 dollars in it from a woman coming out of a local club. He had asked her, rather foolishly, if she was Super-girl. As her answer, she took a hundred dollars out of the wallet, a move which he and not the wallet's owner saw, knocked him unconscious for his stupidity, and then gave the wallet back to its owner. She left a hundred dollars richer and a bit happier at having made the world a better place. 


	2. Mission 2: Kill Spiderman

Mission #2: Kill Spiderman  
  
Before Christie started working as an assassin, Ra's Al Ghul had once procured a file from Batman's computer which carried detailed instructions on how to disable or destroy any member of the JLA, in case they were possessed or turned evil, as they happened to do on multiple occasions. Ghul had once been able to nearly destroy the JLA with this information, and only by Batman's intervention was he stopped. The threat of possession was gone now, of course, with so many powerful psychics on Earth and in the different teams, the X-Men especially, but the event led Christie to believe one thing: that every hero had his weakness. This encouraged her not to try to overpower her enemies as others had done, but to find their weaknesses and strike them hard and fast like Ra's Al Ghul had done, but to come up with the solutions herself so her enemies couldn't anticipate them. This was why, when the Kingpin offered her 200 million to kidnap Spiderman, she refused on the grounds that she only killed her targets. And that was how she got her current job for the Kingpin. Apparently he admired such 'sadistic bravado' as he called it and promised her 300 million if she could kill the wallcrawler. Her decision had nothing to do with sadism or bravado, but she didn't feel like arguing with the man: if her logical perceptions gained her another 100 million, she would take it. Besides, she had more things to do with her time and energy that argue with the Kingpin over semantics: she had to find a way to kill Spiderman.  
  
She found her way in a glass container contained in the Fantastic Four's headquarters. Using a handy mind-wave frequency nullifier that the Kingpin gave her to protect her from being sensed by the Invisible Woman, the Four's team psychic extraordinaire, she penetrated their headquarters through a skylight entrance above their lavatories. Using a precise map of the place, she found her way into the scientific labratories, not met by any of the Fantastic Four, who were out of the building at a Science Expo that Professor Reeds was heading up. Christie found what she was looking for unguarded, with only an electronic sensor serving as a warning for her activities. She quickly disabled the security protocols and reached her hand into the open container, towards the black ooze that lay within. Venom. The Fantastic Four had been commisioned to hold it in stasis under a barrage of radiation, extreme cold, and sound to keep it submissive. Once she touched it, though, it sprung into action, literally sliding over her suit, and into her skin, in a matter of seconds. Christie knew she had little time: it wouldn't take long before Venom recovered from its weakness and started trying to possess her like it and its brother, Carnage, tried to do to all of its targets, and her healthy body would certainly recover it quicker. However, she wasn't able to get out quite so soon.   
"Hello little one."  
  
Christie spun around in an instant to face her possible enemy only to see a man in a red suit with a devil spandex mask that covered his nose and eyes and red, fake horns. Across his chest was blazoned the infamous insignia of the double D's. Daredevil. She knew who he was, and that he had probably identified some kind of information about her from the sounds she made in her skintight suit, but she couldn't afford to speak, which would reveal herself as a female… if he didn't already know.   
"Come now, my little kunoichi. You didn't expect to waltz into the headquarters of the Fantastic Four without someone here to meet you."  
He knew she was female, then. 'Kunoichi' was the term for a female ninja in Japanese. She disquised her already muffled voice (muffled by the suit), when she spoke to him.  
"So you're the welcoming committee? I'm not impressed."  
"Oh, stop trying to hide your voice. The added stressors in your voice, although difficult to perceive through spandex, make it obvious that that's not the voice you're comfortable in."  
She had heard he was perceptive… but that perceptive? Oh well. It didn't matter. Already she could feel Venom starting to form a consciousness. It would take it at least a day to be fully functioning, and a week longer to even threaten control, but she didn't have the time to be messing with this superhero punk.   
"Get out of my way."  
Normally, Daredevil could have stopped her with his staff. He was, after all, as strong as her physically and better trained in the martial arts (including the use of that staff). However, this wasn't a normal situation. Although Venom was weak, it was already augmenting her abilities, and she still hadn't tapped into her adrenaline. It was a handy trick she'd learned, the ability to tap into adrenaline at will. Her body, having the adrenal glands but no fear to stimulate them, learned to control them at will, a compensation for her extreme endeavors. Daredevil's strike to the side of her head barely made her flinch, and her responding quick-jab to the face knocked him back into the wall. He wasn't done from the fight, still having plenty of 'umph' in that frame of his, but she didn't bother sticking around. She ran back to the lavatories and climbed up the walls, an interesting little trick that having Venom gave her along with her own webslingers, stealth suit, and a few other knicknacks. Once she was over the top and into the open, she went directly to Peter Parker's house.  
  
As Venom's consciousness starting coming into existence, a few memories that Venom held close to heart came into Christie's mind. Memories of hate. Memories of Peter Parker and Spiderman. Christie knew from a few video clips of the webslinger's duels with Venom that unlike all other enemies, Venom could surprise Spiderman, knew Spiderman's moves, and (most importantly), knew his identity. Although Venom's knickknacks were a cool throwback, she really needed nothing more than the suprise factor and the information contained in Venom's psyche. Once she arrived at Peter's house, she climbed down its side, opened his window, and stepped in to see his sleeping form. Oddly, an old childhood poem came to mind and she took the gun with the silencer and removed Spiderman from the world.  
'Come into my parlor, said the Spider to the fly.'  
  
The Kingpin came through on his promise, mostly. A third of the bills were counterfeit, so he only actually paid what he said he'd originally pay, but Christie expected that. Now, all she had to do was deal with Venom and she'd be on with the next mission. She was a little disappointed, of course, that this mission had brought with it no fear, but she figured that the fact that it was so easy meant she was getting better, and she could go after more difficult, more frightening targets.   
  
Mission Accomplished #2: An Epilogue  
  
When Peter Parker was found dead, it wasn't a big-news event, although two people were left saddened afterwards: Peter's aunt and girlfriend. Without any pictures of Spiderman, which Peter Parker alone provided, and with no further 'Spiderman sightings' to pin up, the Daily Bugle started resorting back to normal news, only every once in a while posting an 'Is The Menace Really Gone?' article. In order to pick up the heroism slack Spiderman's disappearance caused, the Daredevil took on a blind disciple, much in the same way as 'The Stick' took him on. This discipline, Blindside, became an awesome fighter/analyzer in the vain of his teacher rather quickly, forced to become extremely good extremely fast by the missions Daredevil put him on: beating muggers and such. In under two years, he had virtually replaced Spiderman on the crimefighting scene. The knowledge that Venom was unleashed was kept silent, a blob of black ink placed in the blace of Venom in the container until it could be found. Daredevil consulted the one person who could help him, Batman, giving him the description of the girl that he could get: that she was about 5'6", was female, was possessed of an ancient alien symbiote, and had a taste for Chinese food. Although Batman was unable to answer who it was, he decided on his criminal intuition to visit the Scarecrow in Arkham Asylum and learned that this attacker as well had no fear. She was the same one who killed Superman, and now they had a lead.  
  
Christie found an interesting side-effect to the neural wave-link blocker… and that's that it blocked Venom's more controlling thoughts from reaching her. Even if it's symbiotic nature managed to consume her skin, it couldn't control her… but she could use it. So she kept it as a side trinket in the case that she would need it on later assignments, and need it she would. Before she knew what was going on, she was flinging through the universes to another to meet the enemies of the Green Lantern, the Quarrians. And they had the yellow ring. They said they would give her the ring, no strings attached, if she killed Green Lantern with it. She grinned, accepted the ring, and found herself on the bench in downtown New York that she had made her home while she was stationed there. As she lied, a thought came to her:   
'Why don't I start collecting superpowers? I have fearlessness, adrenaline, Venom, and now the yellow ring…'  
It was an interesting thought that she'd have to contemplate for the future. 


End file.
